Music in our genes?

© ILLC Blog, Illustration by Marianne de Heer Kloots

 

 

"In 1984, a curious study on musicality in animals was published. The researchers from Portland, Oregon trained pigeons to distinguish two pieces of music – one by Bach, the other by Stravinsky. If the birds got it right, they were rewarded with food. Afterwards, the same pigeons were exposed to new pieces of music from the same composers. Surprisingly, they were still able to determine which piece was composed by which composer.

This finding confronted researchers with a new set of questions. To what extent are animals musical? What does it even mean for an animal to be musical? And what can this teach us about musicality in humans?" 

(From Music in our genes, ILLC Blog).

The interview is based on an episode of the podcast “Talk that Science” – an initiative started by students from the University of Amsterdam.

• Listen to the episode here (in Dutch);

• Link to the English transcript can be found here.

Does musicality have a biological basis?

Participants of the Adacemy Colloquium on Musicality and Genomics, held on 20 and 21 June 2019 at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam | © www.miletteraats.nl

While there is still quite some debate on the cultural and biological origins of music, there is a growing consensus that musicality has deep biological foundations, based on an accumulation of evidence for the involvement of genetic variation. Recent advances in molecular technologies provide an effective way of investigating these biological foundations. In particular, genome-wide genotyping offers a promising route to capture the polymorphic content of large phenotyped population samples. These approaches provide complementary evidence to recent knowledge gained from examining clustering in families and co-occurrence in twins of extreme levels of musical ability. However, the success of molecular genetic studies of musical ability is critically dependent on robust, objective, and reliable measures of musicality phenotypes. 

The colloquium, that was held on 20 and 21 June 2019 in Amsterdam, aimed to 1) evaluate existing measures of musicality, such as the GOLD-MSI, PROMS, AMMA, MET, Karma, Seashore, etc., and 2) discuss the opportunities to administer these standardized aptitude tests online on a large scale, especially using web-based and engaging gaming techniques. The latter will provide an important step towards 3) the design of high-powered genome-wide screens to be able to effectively analyse musical phenotypes (Gingras,Honing, Peretz, Trainor, & Fisher, 2018). Lastly, 4) a key goal was to initiate an international and truly interdisciplinary consortium aimed at identifying the genetic bases of musicality. More information can be found at www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019/.

Interested in the biological basis of music and musicality?

Lecture room at KNAW.

Get inspired during a masterclass on Musicality and Genetics that will be held at the KNAW - Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen on Wednesday 19 June 2019 in Amsterdam.

Register soon, and submit your abstract here, before May 15, 2019.

www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019

Interested in the biology of musicality?

This June in Amsterdam, leading experts from diverse fields meet to explore how advances in genomics can give insights into the biology of musicality. The KNAW Colloquium is preceded by a Masterclass (June 19), now open for applications. Spread the word!

Young researchers, PhD-students, and master students in the fields of music cognition, psychology, and genetics are cordially invited to join our Master Class on 'Musicality and Genomics': See http://www.mcg.uva.nl/musicality2019/masterclass.html.

Does musicality have a biological foundation?

Genes with functions that are relevant to music aptitude such as hearing, cognitive performance and neurodegenerative functions are marked by triangles (From Liu et al., 2016).

A few days ago a study was published by the team of Irma Järvelä (University of Helsinki) on the identification of genetic variants underlying musical ability. They based their new study (Liu et al., 2016) on an existing database of ca. 150 unrelated Finnish subjects that were tested for their musical ability using a collection of pitch and pattern perception tests. In addition, for all participants genomic DNA was available (based on a blood sample). The participants were divided into two groups (low vs high musical aptitude), with the lower scoring individuals functioning as the control group.

The study focused on regions that can be associated with positive selection (Sabeti et al., 2006). Using genomic and bioinformatic techniques, the researchers were able to identify those regions that contain sets of variations in the DNA and show which regions are likely under positive selection.

The regions that were identified contained genes that are involved in auditory perception (e.g. GPR98, USH2A), cognition and memory (e.g. GRIN2B, IL1A, IL1B, RAPGEF5), reward mechanisms (RGS9), and song perception and production of songbirds (e.g. FOXP1, RGS9, GPR98, GRIN2B).

There are, of course, some drawbacks in this study that is largely exploratory. While the study was able to identify positively selected regions, the actual genes involved and their function remains unclear. Musicality is, obviously, a complex trait that likely has many contributing genes, and developing a proper phenomics is still quite a challenge (cf. Gingras et al., 2015). Nevertheless, the study suggests that several genes – that can be argued to be essential for musical aptitude (or musicality at large) – could well be under positive selection. The result hence supports the idea that musicality has a biological foundation that is necessary for the development of musical culture.

Liu, X., Kanduri, C., Oikkonen, J., Karma, K., Raijas, P., Ukkola-Vuoti, L., Teo, Y., & Järvelä, I. (2016). Detecting signatures of positive selection associated with musical aptitude in the human genome Scientific Reports, 6 DOI: 10.1038/srep21198

Sabeti, P. (2006). Positive Natural Selection in the Human Lineage Science, 312 (5780), 1614-1620 DOI: 10.1126/science.112430

Gingras, B., Honing, H., Peretz, I., Trainor, L., & Fisher, S. (2015). Defining the biological bases of individual differences in musicality Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1664), 20140092-20140092 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0092